I found six and a half times as many caches in January 2016 as I have in all the other January’s in the 6 years I have been caching put together… February on the other hand was not the same… between 2010 – 2015 I had found 117 caches in February, as you can tell from the title of this post I found nowhere near 6.5 times that number in Feb 2016 – rather than 760 caches I found just 4… and only one of them was a real cache, the other three smileys were for going to the pub !

6th February 2016 – For The First Time In The UK …   GC68E9N – cache #4001
AT the 2016 UK Mega in North Wales the Czech Cachers are bringing over their GPS Maze exhibit. This will attract a lot of cachers to the event as there is a rare icon to get for the maze (it will only be the 4th time the maze has been seen in Europe and the first time in the UK)
So the organising committee held an event to launch the maze listing on the Geocaching website, this involved a 3 way video conference tie up between Wales, Czechoslovakia dn the USA where one of the directors of Groundspeak actually pressed the button to publish the Maze listing.
It was a good evening, dodgy technology nearly spoiled it but the maze got launched in the end
Well worth the drive over from Yorkshire

20th February 2016 – “I’ve paid my way” – a tribute to Camera Man  GC68WTQ – cache #4002
Camera Man was a cacher who was CO of the York City Walls trail, and unfortunately he passed away early in 2016, so an event was held in his honour. I always enjoy a trip to York though on this occasion I decided it was a bit cold to do any other caches in York, so the only thing I did was go to the pub

29th February 2016 – Leap Meet in Thirsk GC69JR9 – cache #4003
There was a souvenir available for attending an event on Leap Day which was a Monday this year. I had the choice of three events, one in Castleford, one at the far side of Bradford or the one I chose to attend in Thirsk – obviously Thirsk was a lot further away than the others, but according to google it wasn’t going to take any longer driving to Thirsk than to the others as it was straight up the A1 rather than fighting through the city traffic

29th February 2016 – All Caches Great and Small GC2TMDZ – cache #4004
There was another souvenir available for finding a cache on Leap Day, so after the event I walked down to the James Herriott museum in Thirsk  only a couple of streets from the pub, but freezing rain lashing down didn’t make it pleasant. Fortunately the cache is easy to find and I could shelter in the museum doorway to sign the log out of the weather.